A Comparison of Scaling Methods to Obtain Calibrated Probabilities of Activity for Ligand-Target Predictions

In the context of bioactivity prediction, the question of how to calibrate a score produced by a machine learning method into reliable probability of binding to a protein target is not yet satisfactorily addressed. In this study, we compared the performance of three such methods, namely Platt Scaling, Isotonic Regression and Venn-ABERS in calibrating prediction scores for ligand-target prediction comprising the Naïve Bayes, Support Vector Machines and Random Forest algorithms with bioactivity data available at AstraZeneca (40 million data points (compound-target pairs) across 2112 targets). Performance was assessed using Stratified Shuffle Split (SSS) and Leave 20% of Scaffolds Out (L20SO) validation.